Alternative Editorial: Easter Message
As we move into the run up to Easter in the UK – Week 50 of The Shift - we want to join with you in a thought experiment. Although less than 50% of the UK are expected to identify as Christians in soon to be published census, we recognise a shared culture with the citizens of these islands and participate in its rituals. Whether that be chocolate eggs and hot cross buns, or giving thought to the image of Christ on the cross. As the gospels have it, the Son of God was crucified on Good Friday and then resurrected on Easter Day.
By whatever means this story reaches you, it has never been easy to contemplate: a story of extreme injustice and violence followed by cosmic redemption. Not a simple act to follow or imitate. Maybe that why it is accompanied by the notion – from 2 Corinthians 5:15 - that Jesus died ‘for us’. It’s not an example we need to follow, but it is transformative idea.
And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
There will be many reading this who have spent a lifetime grappling with the meaning of these phrases, so we won’t attempt a quick interpretation here. Even so, it seems an appropriate time to invite the question ‘what can die that might be reborn in a way that gives hope to all? Not simply as a reading of the Bible, but as a metaphor for these extreme times we are living through.
We’re daring to ask such a big question, as everywhere we’re engaging with we find a great yearning for something new to emerge that will adequately respond to the crises we are in. Whether looking through the eyes of young people demanding radical action for climate change or social justice movements demanding equality – as they have done for decades. In the past year these voices have shifted and amplified to include people newly waking up to the toxicity of the system that is killing them.
So compelling is this cry that even those that perpetuate the sick system will simulate adopting the goals of those clamouring for change in order to stay popular. Amongst those would be major producers of unsustainable consumer goods who use misleading advertising to retain their customers. Or oil producers who invest in renewable energy but keep quietly plundering the earth. Or politicians who claim to be at the forefront of climate change while opening a new coal mine (a ruse that the current British and Chinese governments have in common). By saying one thing and doing another they trap citizens emotionally, holding out the possibility that change can happen under their grasp, while never doing enough to fulfil on that promise.
This is not to denigrate the better efforts. In the UK there is so much good work being done by some heroic political representatives at the centre of power, intent on protecting us from further sliding backwards. But the structure and culture of our socio-political-economic system makes it impossible to get traction. What better example than the failure of the Green Party in the UK to gain more than one seat in the Westminster Parliament (though some more in Europe)? Despite gathering over a million votes nationally and having Caroline Lucas as their leader for so many years – regularly polled amongst the most popular MPs in the country - before she stepped back to concentrate on her constituency.
There is no simple remedy. The possibility of people coming together, to use their immense human resources – imagination, empathy, creativity, courage, ingenuity – appears to the mainstream news as, at best, a futile struggle. When the struggle actually happens, the events are reframed as inconvenient and fundamentally flawed.
Those of us in the movement for a genuine alternative – well defined by Buckminster Fuller as the “new model that makes the old one obsolete” – are ourselves often conflicted. Straddled between what we see as ‘real’ and what we sense is ‘ideal’, we try to keep our spirits up and our efforts focused. Yet find ourselves talking more about the problems and obstacles to something being born, than about the thrill of a new politics.
From thought experiment to action experiment
Within this mass experimentation with new organisations, tools and practices, we find a constant anxiety about our inability to collaborate, our tendency to self-sabotage, the increasing complexity of gender conflicts, the cloning of old power structures, the ongoing absence of an agreed set of goals or container for action – without which traction is difficult. Too many of us, identifying ourselves as moving on from the old system in our imagination, imagine ourselves to be part of it no longer: as if our ‘sins’ can be washed away. Whereas in reality, as long as we move though and operate within the society we see as ‘unjust, racist, greedy’, we are colluding with it in ways we can barely imagine.
That’s not a simple critique, more an observation of the continuing emotions attached to what we increasingly understand as a trauma-shaped history. When past power structures and cultures have caused so much harm – to the planet, to our communities to ourselves – it’s not easy to move on from them. We need personal and collective ways to process the trauma if we are to start again on a healthier path. And new ways to take on our responsibility as citizens for the transformation of the whole.
In the absence of those tools being readily available - or for each of us to have the time or inclination to use them – there are nevertheless many examples of a shift occurring (see our 50 editorials over the pandemic period, identifying many of these initiatives and joining the dots between them). Often this is the result of certain levels of privilege – those with time and plenty of cultural capital to move quickly into new ways of acting. Sometimes it is those with inner capacities to hold competing realities in their minds at once, not easily de-railed by the mainstream headlines or social media. Still others feel they have been in this developmental project for decades and see every new green shoot as evidence of the Spring they always knew was coming.
What do they have in common? What tips them from being in the world of the bewildered and yearning into the world of the steadily building? Is it a belief system they’ve silently brought into? Possibly, but if that’s so, no-one has articulated it clearly. We suspect that if anyone of us tried to, we would have many disagreements.
Is it hope and conviction in human potential? Certainly for some: although so often those that espouse that mind-set still find it easy to separate those they believe in and those they don’t. Such is the state of our socio-cultural discourse, that we often find it easiest to describe our morals as boundaries, making it clear who is outside. Movements come into being around shared values, implying those that don’t share them are excluded. Even if we meet them in our communities every day, we feel comfortable constructing spaces they cannot walk into.
Right at the heart of this paradoxical reality is the new divide between what is described as woke and anti-woke. This argument between what might have been described once as politically correct and its decriers has led to long-awaited progress on the one hand and life-changing disruption for some on the other. All this takes place in democracies that, at the same time, feel advanced and special (only 8% of people live globally in what are described here as full democracies).
Resurrect your dream, and see what happens next
In this minefield, what can be imagined as a failsafe route to a better system? Going back to the Easter metaphor, how do we escape from the clearly dysfunctional and self-destructing world that leads to eventual catastrophe? How, within the possibility of a resurrection, can we get there? Is it possible to leave behind one way of experiencing life and pick up another? Might mindfulness, positive psychology, plant medicine take us there? That is the thought experiment.
However, there is also an “action” experiment on offer which rests on the notion of investment. Not financial investment – although that could play a part – but your personal investment in the new system you yearn for. How much of your time, headspace and capital of all kinds are you willing to invest in the new system you can see arising, however fragile it is now.
A kindness tree
Do you entertain the idea of a resurrection but invest more days and hours in survival of the fittest within the old politics, economy and media? Do you argue for change but hope someone else will effect it? Protecting your comfort zone, by claiming you have no power, is a de facto investment in your powerlessness.
Wherever you meet your own cognitive dissonance – taking up a cause while simultaneously colluding with the problem – is the frontier we are describing. The chance each of us have to make a difference by transcending our own contradictions can shift the whole of society.
This is not a trial by editorial: who amongst us is not facing these internal challenges every day? Yet the possibility of adopting an ‘investment strategy’ is that of having a clear trajectory of change and sticking with it.
Giving more of our time and capacities to building the new system we see arising is exactly what will bring it about. When we meet the paradoxes described above, having such a clear rationale for our behaviour can rescue us from going round in circles.
For example, when designing a new piece of infrastructure that would help more people to learn, exchange and develop their creativity, don’t stop when you encounter old problems arising in the space. Keep in mind, however, that creating space to allow the old problems to resolve themselves might mean giving away some of the space you occupy yourself. Building something new is likely to feel different than anything we have experienced before.
When Mary Portas was invited by the government to re-imagine the high street in 2011 the brief was to bring them back to life. In her report The Portas Review she emphasised the importance of co-creating town centres with business owners with the local community in mind – but there was no clear vision other than to get away from the monopolies of national chains and restrictions of town planning. In 2019 Portas came out with a quite different idea – that we are in the midst of a global kindness revolution that will change our economy and transform our high streets.
Within that much wider – more confident and energetic – story so much more will be able to happen. For evidence, see the #bekind initiative in Stoke that is leading to exactly that kind of new economy Portas describes. In many ways, that was the resurrection of a previous dream that did not depend upon the collapse of the old system before it could become a new destination.
For those projects currently finding it hard to resist the gravitational pull of the dominant social-political-economic system it might take as many years as Portas did to make that shift in mind-set. But for others it will happen much more quickly. As if the negative lens through which they are currently looking at their own work could be flipped into a positive one, not through argument, but through changing perspective. Enjoy this little game to give you a sense of that.
In the meantime, we wish you a Happy Easter and hope you have enough time in the coming week to consider what story of our reality you might be prepared to let go of, without solving it. If there was a resurrection of the full possibility of your deepest dream, what would it give you license to do next?
There will be no Weekly newsletter next week as we take that much needed time for ourselves!